A Beginner's Guide To Using Reddit

April 10, 2017

Reddit is often referred to as the "front page of the internet". Why? Because it's essentially a social bookmarking site where anyone and everyone can share links and information in a message board format. Reddit is quite the popular site, with as of April 2017, upwards of 17+ million unique monthly visitors and 145+ million monthly page views. They are quite upfront with their traffic and keep it up to date on their website at all times for all to see. You can even see traffic on an hourly and daily basis!

What is the most important aspect of Reddit? Sharing. Without users sharing links, or information, there is no Reddit. But then when you throw upvoting, downvoting, and subreddits into the mix, Reddit suddenly becomes very confusing for newcomers. But we'll try to clear all of that up with this beginner's guide to using Reddit, so buckle up, enjoy the ride, learn a little about Reddit, then create your free account and join in on one of the most enjoyable online communities you may ever find!

There are categories within Reddit that are then divided into subreddits. A subreddit has its own topic and more often than not, its own niche community of people interested in that topic. For example, popular subreddits include "gameofthrones" and is targeted towards people interested in the HBO series, books, and other materials, another is "pokemongo" and is targeted towards people interested in the game Pokemon Go, and another is "StarWars" and is targeted towards people interested in anything Star Wars related.

Think of a subreddit being it's own page within Reddit containing unique content, and often with its own branding and rules, as seen with the examples given above. You'll notice when you first go to http://reddit.com/, you are automatically subscribed to a handful of popular subreddits, such as Random, AskReddit, Funny, Videos, Gaming, Pics, and so on, and these are displayed across the top of your screen. The subreddit is also displayed below any links, stories, or information shared on the homepage of Reddit, as shown in the below screenshot.

What Is Upvoting & Downvoting?

Reddit has its own voting system in place, and that's where upvoting and downvoting comes into play. Think of it as a popularity game of sorts. You want the link or information you submitted to get the maximum amount of exposure as possible, and in order to achieve that, what you submitted needs to be as high as possible in the subreddit you submitted it to. How does that happen? By getting more and more upvotes.

Then there is another thing to consider - your score. What is your score? The number of upvotes you get minus the number of downvotes you get. So your goal should always be to have more upvotes than downvotes, otherwise you have a score of zero, meaning your content isn't going to be getting a whole lot of exposure on Reddit. According to Reddit Secrets, a number of factors used by Reddit's algorithm go into staying high on the list of links within any subreddit, all of which you must understand if you want to use Reddit as an effective marketing tool: